Cycling the Bay Area & Stories from the Garden

Can you spare any gopher wood?

With the amount of rain that we are getting pummeled with here in Northern California (3-storms, back-to-back), I am getting a feeling that an ‘Ark’ may just be in order sooner than later, and you can’t go building an ark without gopher wood, now can you? I will figure out what exactly a cubit equals later; unfortunately, my iPod app I use for the conversion of weights and measures is noticeably lacking the cubit as a convertible unit of measure. Damn your short sightedness Mr. Jobs!!

My patio, just slightly under water!

Thankfully my patio has fairly decent drainage; however, there is generally some manual user input required to ensure that this drainage actually works as designed. Namely, lots of sweeping of the excess standing water and the removal of the accumulation of bamboo leaves which quickly form a water proof barrier to the aforementioned drain.

Yep, another rearrangement of plants/planters

Anyway; the garden is absolutely loving the rain, and the removal of the excess water of this morning was a fairly straight-forward and simple operation all things considered. Sadly; as you might expect, today is not wholly conducive to photography (other than the watery wonderland I awoke to this morning) so I will fill in the gaps with some pictures from the last week, including an update on a couple of my desk plants in my office which are both blooming in different ways.

Those office plants would be my Anthurium and my Coleusv. Kong Mix. Mr. Anthurium is currently in the midst of its relatively interesting flowering state and is sending up three new flowers. The flowers themselves are actually relatively small and develop into a spike on a fleshy axis, known as the ‘Spadix‘, which also includes a spathe – but all of these together and you get the cute red part, which collectively is known as an inflorescence.

Anthurium sending up new flowers (inflorescence)

My other office desk plant which decided that now would also be the perfect time to begin setting flowers is my Coleus, v. Kong Mix, which like the anthurium, the flowers are tiny and form into an inflorescence. Ain’t Science Grand?!?!

Coleus sending up its flower stalks as well

As mentioned previously, I was able to get a couple of shots of the patio over the week, and I would like to share these two with you.The first is my Aloe Vera plant, which I re-potted over the week when I harvested my Yukon Gold potatoes (they were growing along with the Peace Lily in the planter which the Aloe now lives!). This aloe was in dire need of re-potting, evidenced by the large roots which were protruding from the underside of its old (tiny) container. I think he will be quite happy in his new home, lots of room to spread his legs and grow.

My re-potted Aloe Vera plant

Well friends, I am sad to say that my closing shot this week is of my greatly under performing Yukon Gold potato patch. Yes friends, the harvest was two, count ’em, two whole potatoes; however, they were tasty!